Booknotes: Funny Thing About the Civil War

New Arrival:

• Funny Thing About the Civil War: The Humor of an American Tragedy by Thomas F. Curran (McFarland, 2023).

One of the things I enjoy most about reading Civil War soldier diaries and letters is the sense of humor so many of these individuals were able to maintain in the face of daunting misery, hopelessness, sickness, and death. When past writers convey humorous puns and frame ironic situations in ways that we ourselves might do today, it makes them and their experiences more relatable.

Humorous social interaction, of the gallows variety or otherwise, has always been part of the human condition, but, according to historian Thomas Curran (you might recall his excellent previous book Women Making War), it remains an understudied topic in its broader Civil War context, though much has been written about Lincoln's legendary jokes and yarn spinning.

Curran finds precedent in Cameron Nickels's Civil War Humor (2010) but maintains that his new book Funny Thing About the Civil War: The Humor of an American Tragedy is "very different." In Curran's view, the closest shared aspect is the wide range of humor types examined in both books.

From the description: "Examining humor in depictions of the Civil War from the war years to the present, this review covers a wide range of literature, film and television in historical context. Wartime humor served as a form of propaganda to render the enemy and their cause laughable, but also to help people cope with the human costs of the conflict. After the war many authors and, later, movie and television producers employed humor to shape its legacy, perpetuating myths and stereotypes that became ingrained in American memory. Giving attention to the stories behind the stories, the author focuses on what people laughed at, who they laughed with and what it reveals about their view of events." Covering the war years and beyond, the book does not examine the use of humor to propagandize, criticize, or lampoon aspects of the emerging prewar sectional divide (at least while it was happening).

Curran's Civil War humor study is presented in three parts. Part I demonstrates how funny stuff was used to "combat the war, criticize the conflict, and cope with the event's fouler side." How postwar writers sought to shape remembrance of the war, mainly through published memoirs and fiction, is addressed in Part II. Part III expands on the previous memory-focused section, "exploring how modern technologies and new platforms combined with print methods to present both traditional depictions and postmodern interpretations of the war" (pg. 4). Sounds interesting.